With football season here, longtime NFL insider (Yahoo! Sports, Bleacher Report, SiriusXM), Jason Cole, has a lot of strong insight into why he's picking unders more often than not the first two weeks of this NFL season over at SportsBetCollective.com.
"It’s not sexy and it’s not fun. However, playing the under may be profitable for the first week or two of the 2018 season if a trend from last year holds up.
In 2017, scoring crashed in a significant way around the NFL. There was a decrease of 1.1 points per team in each game (or 2.2 points per game) as scoring dropped to 43.4 points per game. That’s the biggest year-to-year decrease since a similar drop from the 1995 to the 1996 season.
And scoring was particularly down in the first two weeks of the season. If you assume the lowest under total on a week-to-week basis is 42, there were 18 of 31 games (the Tampa-Miami game was postponed in the opening week last season) that featured 42 or fewer points scored in the first two weeks last season. Breaking that down even further, the average game feature 41.7 points scored in the first week and 40.5 points in the second week.
That total of 18 is by far the highest since the NFL and its players signed the 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement which featured significant decreases in hitting during training camp and regular season practices. The previous high was 15 in 2014."
Here is where to find the rest of the article.
https://sportsbetcollective.com/article/playing-the-under-in-week-one